Something to Be Desired (20 page)
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Authors: Thomas Mcguane
“I guess I was,” said Lucien, “but he’s long gone now.”
Lucien’s son waved back to him, and Suzanne kept her eye on the road.
Thomas McGuane is the author of several highly acclaimed novels, including
The Sporting Club; The Bushwhacked Piano
, which won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters;
Ninety-two in the Shade
, which was nominated for the National Book Award;
Panama; Nobody’s Angel; Something to Be Desired; Keep the Change;
and
Nothing but Blue Skies
. He has also written
To Skin a Cat
, a collection of short stories; and
An Outside Chance
, a collection of essays on sport. His books have been published in ten languages. He was born in Michigan and educated at Michigan State University, earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Yale School of Drama and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. An ardent conservationist, he is a director of American Rivers and of the Craighead Wildlife-Wildlands Institute. He lives with his family in McLeod, Montana.
INTAGE
B
OOKS BY
T
HOMAS
M
C
G
UANE
“He is among the most arresting and
fascinating writers of his generation.”
—
San Francisco Chronicle
THE BUSHWHACKED PIANO
Unstable, lovelorn, and wildly persistent, Nicholas Payne travels from Michigan to Montana on a demented mission of courtship whose highlights include a ride on a homicidal bronco and apprenticeship to the inventor of the world’s first highrise for bats. The result is a tour de force of American Dubious.
0-394-72642-1
NOBODY’S ANGEL
Patrick Fitzpatrick is a former soldier, a fourth-generation cowboy, and a whiskey addict, who finds himself spiraling out of control into that region of romantic misadventure and vanishing possibilities that is Thomas McGuane’s Montana.
0-394-74738-0
SOMETHING TO BE DESIRED
This funny, rueful, and beautifully rendered portrait of American manhood on the rocks says volumes about the lives of dogs and falcons, the yearnings of sons for fathers, and the skeptical truce that men and women sometimes reach when they get tired of fighting.
0-394-73156-5
TO SKIN A CAT
In this short-story collection Thomas McGuane displays the same electric language and generous vision that distinguish his novels. Thirteen stories of great range, humor, and verve show that his large talent is equally suited to the tersest of prose forms.
0-394-75521-9
KEEP THE CHANGE
Joe Starling is a painter who has stopped painting, an illustrator of instruction manuals for wildly useless products, a lover who’s just stolen his girlfriend’s pink convertible. But Starling is also a man of noble ambitions, and his struggle to right himself is mesmerizing, hilarious, and profoundly moving.
0-679-73033-8
NOTHING BUT BLUE SKIES
Chronicling the fall and rise of Frank Copenhaver,
Nothing but Blue Skies
is set in a Montana where cowboys slug it out with speculators, a cattleman’s best friend may be his insurance broker, and love and fishing are the only consolations that last.
0-679-74778-8
See other side for ordering information
.
